Picture this: The world's tiniest fisheye camera

By Eoghan Macguire, for CNN

Updated 1:57 PM ET, Fri April 12, 2013

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Little Cyclops – The Little Cyclops camera may be as small as average adult thumb, but it has powerful features, including a timelapse mode, 12 megapixel resolution and HD video recording capabilities.

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Greg Dash – Inventor Greg Dash only decided to make the device because he couldn't find a reasonably priced alternative fisheye lens for his digital SLR camera and he didn't want to wait for a smartphone app to load.

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Chimpstagram – A posing primate as captured with the Little Cyclops camera. Dash raised the money for producing the camera through crowd-funding website Indiegogo. Only 1,000 will be made in the first run and sold for a price of $100 each.

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Stooping to conquer – Greg Dash stoops to capture a picture. The PhD student has been overwhelmed by interest in the Little Cyclops. At one stage he was receiving an e-mail every seven minutes on the topic.

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Doggy business – People from all around the world have been keen to snap up the device, says Dash, with orders coming in from as far afield as Japan and Taiwan.

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Story highlights

A Welsh student has invented a key-ring sized digital fisheye camera

The Little Cyclops measures in at just 4cm long and 2cm high

Inventor Greg Dash only plans to release 1,000 of the devices before moving on to other products

Twenty-five year-old student Greg Dash was frustrated. He wanted to take "fisheye"-style camera pictures without having to pay for an expensive lens, or fiddle around with a smartphone app. He wanted something light and small that he could pull from his pocket at a moment's notice. Unfortunately such a device did not exist.

So, he went ahead and invented it.

Measuring just four centimeters long and two centimeters high, the "Little Cyclops" has only two buttons and no viewing screen.

However, an array of nifty features -- including a timelapse mode, 12 megapixel resolution and HD video recording capabilities -- have proven so popular with photography enthusiasts that the camera easily surpassed its funding target on the crowdsourcing website, Indiegogo.

The Little Cyclops had raised $100,000 as donations came to a close this morning, almost double the initial $53,000 target.

Dash says he first came up with the idea for the camera late last year when he was unable to find an affordable fisheye lens to use with his own digital SLR camera.

He resolved to fashion one himself using an old camera and a lens he had custom made.

When friends were impressed with the results he decided to see if he could raise the funds to put his invention into production.

A manufacturer -- which he doesn't wish to reveal as he is still in the pre-production phase -- was then sourced to make a limited run of 1,000 devices completely from scratch which will be sold on a first-come first-served basis.

The cameras are priced at $100 each and orders have already arrived from as far afield as Japan and Taiwan.

"It's been amazing as there has been interest from everywhere really, all over the world," Dash said.

"I was even invited to go on Dragon's Den (a popular British TV show where entrepreneurs pitch their products and ideas to prominent businesspeople) but there's no way I'm going on that," he added.